The three friends would all go on to win Academy Awards, helping to establish the classic blueprint for pursuing an acting career in New York: Move here, hone your craft at a gritty acting studio, do a handful of plays, conquer Hollywood.

Things have changed since the heyday of theater-trained movie stars and the independent acting schools that shaped them. Many small studios, threatened by rising rents, decrepit buildings, well-funded university programs, and instant internet stardom, are now struggling.

Just ask Mary Boyer, who moved to the city from the Midwest in 1973 to pursue an acting career. She eventually became a teacher and a director, opening her own school in 2003. But by 2008, Boyer’s 150 students had dwindled to about 50.

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Robert Duvall, far left, front row, in class at the Neighborhood Playhouse with the acting teacher Sanford Meisner, seated at the table, in 1957.CreditNeighborhood Playhouse School for the Theater

“The economy changed,” Ms. Boyer said, “and what actors and audiences wanted sort of changed all at the same time.” She noticed more students expecting “instant gratification.” Her “craft of acting” courses, what she felt most passionate about, were not filling up. Auditioning classes became her new staple.

Last fall, after 43 years in New York, Ms. Boyer gave up her studio space, delegated most of her teaching responsibilities to her associate artistic director, and returned to her hometown of Toledo, Ohio, to open a theater there.

“I just could not keep doing it,” Ms. Boyer said. The lease for her school was up for renewal, and she had realized two things: her rent would continue to increase, and the only way to survive would be to teach more audition classes. “My creative soul was crumbling,” she said.

This year, two other schools with long track records, the Atlantic Acting School and the T. Schreiber Studio, have made significant compromises in order to keep a toehold in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood they helped gentrify.

A symbolic example of the neighborhood’s changing priorities is the fact that the tech giant Google, now the Atlantic’s landlord, has plans to raise the school’s rent to market rate next year when the school’s 12-year lease expires.

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A scene study class at HB Studio. Many schools are reporting that students, pressed for time and money, are replacing acting technique courses with on-camera and audition classes.CreditAdrienne Grunwald for The New York Times

“We’ve moved around Chelsea all this time, and it’s just heartbreaking for the school to have to leave the neighborhood,” said Mary McCann, the Atlantic’s executive director.

For much of the 20th century in New York, independent acting studios, many of them inspired by the Russian theater master Constantin Stanislavsky and the formation of the Group Theater, trained actors who revolutionized the craft and became marquee names, like Marlon Brando and Ellen Burstyn. But gradually, several of these studios joined forces with universities (Stella Adler was the first to go collegiate, in 1972), where their budgets and institutional power dwarfed the reach of the independent institutions. Meanwhile colleges outside of New York also started to offer theater degrees.

“The colleges became our bigger competition,” said Pamela Moller Kareman, executive director of the Neighborhood Playhouse. Applications for the Playhouse’s conservatory program, based on the techniques of its renowned teacher Sanford Meisner (a Stanislavsky protégé who died in 1997), started to decrease about 10 years ago, she said. The school has responded by investing in recruitment and relying on its star-studded alumni system for support (last April, Joanne Woodward established a scholarship there).

“The acting studios that do not have a university alignment are squeezed,” said Emma Dunch, a fund-raising expert for arts and cultural organizations. Successful acting programs affiliated with higher education include Playwrights Horizons, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the Actors Studio, at Pace University. (The Actors Studio, the legendary free-membership organization whose founding artistic director, Lee Strasberg, perfected the Method Acting technique, is only for professional actors, but also offers a three-year M.F.A. program through Pace.)

“It allowed us to expand,” said Tom Oppenheim, artistic director of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, about its 45-year partnership with N.Y.U. The school, which counts Elaine Stritch, Warren Beatty and, more recently, Bryce Dallas Howard, among its former students, has four theaters, a professional-quality set design space, and eight rehearsal rooms. Mr. Oppenheim said that he wants to transform the school into more of a cultural institution, rebranding it as the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, and relocating to an even bigger space.

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Uta Hagen, the actress, teacher, and author of “Respect for Acting,” at HB Studio in the 1970s.CreditPamela Shandel

Since N.Y.U. is affiliated with several independent studios, its undergraduate students can travel “through the studio network” to learn different acting techniques after two years, said Rubén Polendo, chair of the drama department at Tisch. “They can stay within one methodology, or switch it up,” he continued. “You may be able to develop those tools in 15 years, but here you can compress that experience.” The compression comes at a steep price, however: one year of undergrad acting at N.Y.U. costs about $55,000.

For comparison, a full-time course load at most independent studios with no university affiliation costs a fraction of that. The T. Schreiber Studio, for example, charges $16,495 a year for its one-year conservatory program, while the fee for the one-year “Hagen Core Training” program at HB Studio, named for the performer and acting teacher Uta Hagen, is $13,500. The Neighborhood Playhouse charges about $16,500 annually for its two-year school.

Although the Playhouse might not be the star generator it was in its 20th-century heyday, its alumni system is vast, loyal and ever-present. Allison Janney has won multiple Emmy Awards and can be seen most recently in the movie “I, Tonya,” which was written by another Playhouse graduate, Steven Rogers. And millennials have a glimmer of hope in the success of the 2011 graduates Mackenzie Davis, who appeared in “Blade Runner 2049,” and Jasmine Cephas Jones, who played Peggy Schuyler in the Broadway cast of “Hamilton.”

A successful alumni network will no doubt help the Playhouse face the daunting task of maintaining the 1920s-era property it owns.

“It’s like driving a 1947 Chevy,” said Ms. Moller Kareman of the Playhouse, which has been on East 54th Street since Irene and Alice Lewisohn, its founders, bought the two adjacent buildings in Midtown in 1947. The Playhouse has five floors, including a light-filled dance studio designed by Martha Graham, as well as a 99-seat theater.

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Martha Graham designed the dance and movement studio at the Neighborhood Playhouse in the 1940s. “We are all afraid of the roof caving in,” the Playhouse’s executive director said of the old building.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

“We are all afraid of the roof caving in,” said Ms. Moller Kareman, who had to pay $20,000 to fix the building’s out-of-commission elevator when she was first hired. “The elevator guys said we don’t even have parts for this anymore,” she recalled.

HB Studio owns its three West Village properties, all bought in the 1950s and ’60s. It, too, has undergone some belt tightening. Founded by the actor Herbert Berghof, who was joined later by Ms. Hagen, the school and theater collective established a reputation for quality acting classes (its alumni list includes Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange) at famously low rates.

“When Herbert Berghof died in ’90, I think it was still $5 a class,” said Edith Meeks, HB’s current artistic and executive director. But even by 2004, when Ms. Hagen died, HB had only marginally increased tuition. Modest, incremental fee hikes were just not “enough to catch us up to the real expense of running a nonprofit and managing three buildings in the 21st century,” said Ms. Meeks.

So in 2013, for the first time in its history, HB streamlined its curriculum and significantly raised its bargain-basement prices as part of a “one-time adjustment-to-market,” said Ms. Meeks, who confirmed that enrollment is stable but nowhere near the numbers it had in the 1960s. “We were super affordable, and now we are affordable.”

The change was made with a heavy heart, said Ms. Meeks, who admitted that young actors are affected by New York’s real estate and job market just as much as the institutions training them. “They commute from farther and farther away to study with us at HB; many of them have crushing college debt and they struggle to stay employed and to have enough flexibility to continue their creative work,” she said.

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The Neighborhood Playhouse opened its school at the Henry Street Settlement in 1928. In 1947, the Playhouse moved to East 54th Street, where it has been ever since.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

For acting schools that pay rent, the situation is even more tenuous.

The Atlantic Acting School moved into the Chelsea neighborhood 26 years ago, when “no one wanted to be there” and “rent was cheap,” said Ms. McCann. With a pedigree that includes the playwright David Mamet and the actor/director William H. Macy — not to mention a thriving children’s program, a connection to a professional theater with 12 Tony Awards, and even a coveted affiliation with N.Y.U. — it would seem that the school would have a rosy outlook.

But next June the school’s lease will expire, along with the affordable rent that was negotiated for the nonprofit when it first moved into 111 8th Avenue in 2006. Google, which honored the Atlantic’s lease when it purchased the building in 2010, is simply “following the provision stipulated in our lease that allows for a short-term renewal at market rate,” said Jeff Lawson, the Atlantic’s managing director.

So, over the last two years, Mr. Lawson and his team have been looking for an affordable space, but the specifics for what the school needs — at least 20,000 square feet of office and open studio space at an affordable price — have proved to be a daunting challenge.

And yet the Atlantic hopes to have a deal in the Hell’s Kitchen area, according to Mr. Lawson, who reported that his team is currently considering two options. The rent, he said, will be difficult but doable, something between what the Atlantic is currently paying and “Chelsea market rate.” Google, meanwhile, has offered the Atlantic a new lease for its theater, housed in the basement of 111 8th Avenue, for reduced rent.

The T. Schreiber Studio, also in Chelsea, has survived by keeping its classrooms and administrative areas but letting go of its theater.

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Pandora Scooter teaching a “Script Analysis” class to acting students at the Terry Knickerbocker Studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.CreditAdrienne Grunwald for The New York Times

In the mid-90s, Schreiber was riding high on the success of at least two former students, Edward Norton and Peter Sarsgaard. Around the same time, the school was offered the opportunity to buy its East 4th Street building, which was located across the street from the experimental theater La MaMa, next door to New York Theater Workshop, and included a theater space, offices, dressing rooms and a downstairs class area, for $90,000. But the money simply wasn’t there, said Sally Dunn, its managing director.

Instead, the now-49-year-old acting school moved to Chelsea right when it was becoming hot, said Peter Jensen, its artistic director. “You could just see all the hotels going up,” he said.

Meanwhile, student interest in the traditional scene-study class — what Mr. Norton and Mr. Sarsgaard cut their teeth on at Schreiber — was leaning more toward on-camera, commercial and casting classes, said Mr. Jensen. The whole nature of pursuing acting in New York was evolving, while the costs of teaching the trade were rising.

By 2017, the school’s annual rent had mushroomed to more than $300,000. Over the summer, to streamline costs, Schreiber reduced its square footage by more than half, giving up its in-house theater, where a full season of plays were regularly produced. For future productions, said Mr. Jensen, the plan going forward will be to rent space from other theaters like the Cherry Lane and the Robert Moss Theater.

But that might not be as easy or as affordable as hoped. Over the last decade, the city has also lost approximately 50 small performance venues, and according to Ms. Dunch, the arts fundraising expert, this “space crunch” affects the entire nonprofit theater industry, including acting studios.

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“We were super affordable, and now we are affordable,” said Edith Meeks, the artistic and executive director of HB Studio, a school in the West Village that used to be known for bargain-basement prices.CreditAdrienne Grunwald for The New York Times

The Barrow Group, which leases space on West 36th Street, has been fortunate enough to hold on to both its theater space and its classrooms, but not without constant challenges. After the 2008 recession, the professional company and school stopped producing for its main stage. It moved its offices into a storage room. Instead of downsizing the school component, however, it expanded it, said Robert Serrell, its current executive director.

Seth Barrish and Lee Brock, the artistic directors of Barrow, had developed a reputation as actor whisperers, with successful alumni like Anne Hathaway, Tony Hale and the newcomer Noah Schnapp (“Stranger Things”). So they decided to capitalize on their signature teaching style by introducing it to more beginners. The school went from offering 70 classes a year in 2010 to 320 classes, 83 of which were for beginners, in 2016. It worked. The studio is also making inroads in higher education, having recently partnered with Quinnipiac University in Connecticut to produce a New Play Festival.

Main stage productions at Barrow are happening again, some to critical acclaim. That said, the school’s revenue is beginning to plateau and there’s no more space for expansion. The annual rent is around $300,000, with 3.5 percent increases each year, and the booming Hudson Yards development nearby threatens to raise market rates even more. “With the rising cost of everything, it’s scary,” said Mr. Serrell. “We’re a $2.1 million company; we’re still scratching our heads. It’s terrifically challenging, but we’re determined to figure it out.”

Perhaps the answer is to leave Manhattan. The Atlantic looked in Brooklyn, but “it’s not any less expensive,” said Ms. McCann. Even the actor and Renaissance man James Franco, who in 2014 opened a branch of his acting and film school, Studio4, in Fort Greene, couldn’t work his magic: the studio announced it was closing on Oct. 1.

“I had this restless itch to make something of my own,” said Terry Knickerbocker, who opened an acting school in Industry City, an old warehousing and manufacturing complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “I have that corny thing from ‘Field of Dreams,’ if you build it, they will come.”CreditAdrienne Grunwald for The New York Times

“I knew I wanted to be in Brooklyn — three-fourths of my students live here,” said Mr. Knickerbocker, who opened his school in 2015.

The warehouse-chic studio, part of Industry City, has neighbors like Brooklyn Kura, a new sake factory and tasting room, and pba, an Italian design company.

“I had this restless itch to make something of my own,” said Mr. Knickerbocker, a high-profile acting coach whose clients include Sam Rockwell and Emmy Rossum. “I have that corny thing from ‘Field of Dreams,’ if you build it, they will come.”

So far, they have come. After taking out a home equity line of credit and some money from his retirement account (“completely against the advice of my lawyers and accountants”), he has about 100 students. Mr. Knickerbocker “wanted to have a studio that would be an affordable alternative to an M.F.A. program,” he said. The two-year conservatory, with an optional third year, costs about $8,000 annually.

Although students are treated to regular Facebook Live events with movie stars and solo performance workshops, the focus remains on traditional stagecraft and acting technique. And the students are into it. Caleb Lane, 35, in his second year, was a working actor in Los Angeles who “left the business” to train in New York. “I have a lot of famous friends who couldn’t name one Tennessee Williams play,” he said. “People here are more interested in the long game.”

The Knickerbocker invites casting directors and agents to a performance featuring its graduating conservatory actors, as do the T. Schreiber Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse. But the Knickerbocker showcase does not take place on a stage. In a sign of the times, it is virtual. “We write and produce three- to four-minute films with these people, and put them online for casting directors,” he said. “We write it to their sweet spots, shoot it with two cameras, edit it and score it.”

Meanwhile, in Toledo, Ms. Boyer is embracing, somewhat, the changing tides of the acting school business. While she is establishing her theater there, she is continuing to coach her most loyal New York students through Skype.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Acting Studios Face a Shrinking Role. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe